Introduction: What is Your Average Ticket Sale

Managing a store is not simple. There are a lot of operations that need to seamlessly take place every single day to provide engaging shopping experiences for our customers.

Welcoming clients, maintaining a clear and easy-to-navigate product display, overseeing stock-keeping units, and supporting staff are only some of the tasks a store manager needs to carry out daily.

Great managers, however, do this and much more. By leveraging some simple tricks that come from business research and experience they’re able to provide consistent and exciting store experiences that delight customers and increase sales. In this post, we’re going to shed some light on the different techniques and strategies that increase your store revenue, by getting each customer to indulge in that little extra expense.

The average ticket is a popular metric to assess store profitability of a retail store and it helps managers understand how much money your customers are spending. The average ticket is calculated by adding total sales over a given period and dividing it by the number of customers. It’s a simple metric, but it puts a price on each customer.

In this post, we’re going to look into 12 different things you can do today to increase your average ticket sale.

1. Let’s start with upselling, cross-selling and bundle offers
2. Throw in a time-sensitive promotion
3. Provide a financing service for the more expensive items
4. Get your sales team on board with weekly and monthly challenges
5. Work on perfecting your store layout
6.  Train your sales team to provide great experiences to big spenders
7. Try raising your prices, and go the extra mile to solve a problem
8. Make full use of the checkout process to sell addons
9. Give value to your customers with a loyalty program
10. Conclusions

1. Let’s start with upselling, cross-selling and bundle offers.

The most basic rule to increase your customer average ticket is to get himher to buy more products by providing cross-selling, upselling and bundle opportunities. Thinking about mental associations that group products which can be bought together can be a great way to help customers make impulse purchases and buy more.

Studies show in fact that once a customer has decided to make a purchase, heshe instantly becomes more likely to increase the ticket size if provided with the right items. To correctly identify the types of items to display and group, we need to have a clear idea in mind in terms of what are the uses and behaviours associated with the product. If you’re struggling with finding the right associations, check out this article on jobs to be done marketing theory, it may provide some useful insights.

Remember that your shop assistants and brand ambassadors are a key tool to show your customers new and exciting associations and connections between the products in your store, and it’s always a good idea to train them well so that they can identify the right product combinations. Getting them to see how items work together will make them ready to deliver that upsell and cross-sell item sale whenever the opportunity arises.

2. Throw in a time-sensitive promotion.

Using promotions can be an effective approach as well. Bundles or lower prices can help us bypass the costbenefit calculations that customers go through before making a purchase. Making time-sensitive sales can help you get customers to visit your store more frequently, not only getting them to buy more, but also buy more often.

Fast-fashion retailers are particularly well-known for their low prices, but it’s exactly because of how low prices draw us into impulse buying that this business model works. It’s a simple, but sure-fire strategy. If you’d like to read more on the strategies that fast-fashion retailers use to get clients in the store almost every week, we’ve got you covered with our article entitled: Building a Habit is the New Branding.

3. Provide a financing service for the more expensive items.

Money is a scarce resource, and for as much as we’d like to buy more stuff, sometimes our budget is crunched. To get customers to feel better about spending a lot of money, offering financing opportunities can be very helpful. 

If you’re someone who’s struggling to sell more high-priced items, then this is certainly something you should consider.

Financing can be a very effective way to spend more money over time, without impacting our cash reserves and should be certainly considered when approaching small and large investments. Customers will love having this option, especially when you’re selling investment pieces that cannot be easily bought cash-in-hand.

4. Get your sales team on board with weekly and monthly challenges.

Let’s start to think more about your sales force, as they have a big role to play too. Sometimes if you have been a shop assistant or a brand ambassador too long you may miss out of that rush you used to get when you sold your first items.

Sales can be a lot of fun if we keep our motivation up though challenges and rewards. Try setting new goals for your sales team and get them to compete for a prize so that each day they can work towards a clear goal.

Remember that your shop assistants are a key asset to your store as their “intangible” contribution delivers great value to each customer. On our blog, we have a lot of articles that delve in more depth on this topic, if you’d like to read up about it, here’s one of our favourite: Managing Your Retail Store Based on Your Customer Purchase Intent.

5. Work on perfecting your store layout.

In every store, there are ‘hot zones’ and ‘cold zones’. In the hot zones, we usually display the items that we’re trying to push in front of our customer’s eyes, whereas in the ‘cold zones’ we put those articles that customers will be looking for.

It’s essential to manage these zones carefully because they are an indication of the trajectories and pathways our customers will follow in the store. Sometimes the reason why we’re not selling more of a certain product is simply that our customers don’t know it’s there in the first place.

Look into your store layout and see if there’s anything you can do to improve your merchandise display, your visual cues and your focal attention points. There’s a lot of detailed work that can go into ‘perfecting’ your store layout, and if you need some help to figure it out, we’ve got the right resource just for you: How to Design Your Fashion Retail Layout To Maximise Engagement and Profits.

6. Train your sales team to provide great experiences to big spenders

In the pursuit of a higher ticket price, investing in your sales force is one again, key. It’s essential to see if your staff is up-to-speed with sales training so that each member of your staff can deliver on that higher price product. Selling expensive or luxurious items can entail for a more elaborate purchase ritual, and making sure that your staff is well prepared to address the demands of a big spender is key to selling luxury items.

7. Try raising your prices, and go the extra mile to solve a problem

Sometimes rising your average ticket price can be increased by simply increasing your prices. This, of course, does not mean raising the price of every single product you have for sale, but on the contrary, looking at your best sellers and find items that are high in demand, that allow for a bit more margin.

Be always careful as you need to choose wisely what products to sell for a more expensive price tag, and what that means for your customer. At the same time, it’s a good idea to explore this option to see if anything can be done about it.

Your retail store is also competing against ecommerce platform, but with a much more limited inventory. What is the item you customer wants is not on sale? Well, in this case, you should throw in a little benefit for the waiting period. To make sure you don’t lose the customer to a .com, make sure you give free shipping, to account for the inventory shortage. It’s a small thing, but it can do wonders to show your commitment to serving your customer.

8.Make full use of the checkout process to sell addons

The point-of-sale moment is a key moment in your customer journey. If your customer is waiting at the register this means that heshe has decided to buy something, and a transaction is on its way.

In this key moment, you can increase your revenue per customer offering impulse purchase products, that have a chance of being right in front of your customer’s eyes once at checkout. Gift cards are an additional way to monetise this last mile and make sure that you give yourself a chance of increasing each ticket by a few additional items. Getting the customer to throw in the cart those items that are always helpful is a nice way to close the basket with a nice addon.

9. Give value to your customers with a loyalty program

All retailers know that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. This is why a loyalty program is often an essential strategy to implement. There are a few customers who just keep coming back, and make up the bulk of your revenue. It’s important not to give them for granted and make sure that we build a long-term relationship with them.

A loyalty program can be a great way to do this, as it allows you to collect a lot more information about them, and to provide special experiences to make sure they always feel special. What about a special discount? What about an unveiling ceremony? Your imagination is the only limit when designing your premium customer experiences.

Conclusions

As we’ve seen in this post there is a lot that can be done to increase our average ticket. Getting our customers to indulge in more purchases can be done with a little trial and error.

In this post, we’ve listed some of our favourite strategies, that provide results and help us increase profits, we hope you’ve enjoyed reading about them.

Make some notes and try out a few, it’s only through a little experimentation that you can find out what works best for your brand or fashion store.

Here at 440 Industries, we love retail and we have a lot of material that can help you increase your store revenue while developing memorable and meaningful retail experiences for your customers. Take a look below and see if there’s anything else you’d like to read about!

If you’re looking instead for some premium material, check out our online course entitled: The Fashion Industry: Explained where we provide an extensive and detailed analysis of the fashion industry to help you become a world-class fashion professional.